yesterday was important!
and i'm getting to it today! because am basically late for everything!
being pro-choice has always been very simple for me. when i first started getting my period, i realized that menstruation is one of several biological quirks that foists much more bodily consciousness and responsibility on women. as is pregnancy.
any right a father or society has in a fetus is a construct. it's not real. it's a fiction that our society foists on our shoulders to keep up from making the decisions that are rightfully ours to make. if you remove all the cultural notions everyone has about unborn children, the fact remains that a fetus is inside the mother and the buck stops there. she can eat or not as she chooses, drink, smoke, whatever. it's hers and no one else's.
i know, through and through, that this remains true through the duration of the pregnancy. of course, late-term abortions are scarier and even more painful, and unnecessary. you pretty much know a few months in what's up and can deal with it early. if you have access to a clinic (which, if you live in south dakota, you don't. you have to drive to minnesota or montana. which is about a million miles and a million hours. what if you don't have a car? what if you can't get off work? what if you don't want anyone to know? you're basically hosed, aren't you?)
the supreme court said in roe that society has a right in a fetus when it becomes viable. which is horseshit. society has a right in babies. not fetuses. it doesn't matter how far along it is. they're only people if they're separate from each other. one inside the other is one person.
i don't draw distinctions between fetuses and tapeworms. they're parasites. no one has ever argued that someone with a tapeworm can't kill it at their whim. don't go after other unsolicited parasites.
from the time i learned about abortion, it has always struck me as unbelievably, comically presumptuous for anyone, let alone old white men, to think they know what is right for a woman who got pregnant.
i've heard people say that women use abortion as birth control. i'm not buying it, and even if it's true, the only problems are that it's expensive and painful. which is why i don't believe it was ever used as birth control. in this country, anyway. the women i know who have had abortions don't do it because it's fun. they do it because they had a birth control mishap, and because they were not taught about their bodies as children and didn't know any better, which is just criminal.
if men could reproduce, would there ever be a societal presumption that they couldn't make their own decisions about their bodies? there's never been any doubt in my mind that there wouldn't be. it's patronizing and infantile that we're treated this way.
now i'm all fired up and can't even think straight...